This week, we kicked off our latest Founder Fellowship cohort. It capped a month that brought in new raises across the portfolio, a talk with Waymo's co-CEO in SF on what it takes to put AI on the road, and more than 100 members and alumni back under one roof.
If you’re interested in joining SPC, apply here.
Welcome, F26 Founder Fellows!
This week we kicked off the F26 Founder Fellowship, welcoming founders building everything from edible microbes that make peptide drugs to robot actuators, world-model infrastructure, and fungi that clean industrial wastewater. The theme of kickoff was simple: maximum intensity, maximum ambition.
Events at SPC
In SF, Aditya and Ruchi hosted Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov for a conversation on autonomous vehicles, covering the driver-simulator-critic system and what the LLM world can learn from it about safety. Applied Intuition co-founder and CEO Qasar Younis sat down with member Abe Ankumah, and Mercor CEO Brendan Foody joined our Post-Training Forum to talk data and environments for frontier RL.
Alumni Night in San Francisco had more than 100 current members and alumni from the past decade come back for an evening of food, drinks, and catching up. From old faces to new, it was a good reminder that while you might graduate from SPC, you never really leave!
Fund Updates
It was a big month for SPC companies.
Cognition raised over $2B in a Series E at a $48B valuation, led by a16z and Accel. Cognition builds Devin, an AI agent platform for software engineering that now handles everything from incident triage to security review.
Profound raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation, led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. Profound, which got its start at SPC, builds the AI platform for marketing.
Nuance Labs came out of stealth with a $50M Series A led by Lightspeed. Nuance is building a foundation model that reads and responds to facial and vocal cues in real-time conversation.
TenX Semi emerged from stealth with a seed round co-led by SPC and Khosla Ventures. TenX is building AI that finds and fixes bugs in chip design before tape-out. Watch General Partner Mark Jacobstein discuss with co-founders Subhasish Mitra and SukHwan Lim how AI agents can catch the “unknown unknowns” in chip design.
Member Updates
Product Launches & Company News
Sentience launched out of closed beta. It creates a digital twin that looks, thinks, and sounds like you, and can act on your behalf.
Simular opened Sai to the public. Sai is a computer-use agent that handles desktop tasks on its own fleet of computers.
First Contact released a new version of its tactile sensing gloves, now with built-in motion capture.
Asymptote Labs expanded Beacon. The open-source tool turns your coding-agent history from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and 20+ other tools into shared knowledge that future sessions can reuse.
Personal Projects, Explorations & Publications
Jack and Jeffrey set two new NanoGPT speedrun world records on the Muon and MuonH optimizers.
Ed and team solved the 70-year-old Pierce–Birkhoff conjecture for under $500.
Vasu wrote a field guide to how lab science actually gets done, mapping where AI and robotics fit in drug discovery and materials.
Coming Up
-1 to Physical Intelligence with Sergey Levine (SF), October 6th
Fireside Chat with Tony Zhao, Sunday Robotics (SF), October 15th
Recent Content
Helmy Eltoukhy (Guardant Health) talks early cancer detection and the “everything test,” and Srinivas Narayanan (ex-OpenAI, ex-Meta) talks building through uncertainty and the future of AI safety. Joel Lewenstein, Anthropic’s head of design, makes the case for AGI-maximalist product design.
Thanks for reading! The work continues.